[ARSCLIST] Hatto Hoax (was Pristine Audio (?!))

[Michael Biel <m.biel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Graeme Jaye mentions that Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio was the one who
uncovered the "Hatto scandal."   I had heard a little about this, but on the
Pristine site is a link to the entire story.
http://www.pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html   You all ought to take a look
at all of this information because it is a fascinating story of the technology
of faking the identity of sound recordings, and the technology of discovering
them.

I want to state here and now -- I told you so!!  I warned you twenty years
ago!  At the 1986 ARSC conference in NYC I participated in a panel discussing
ways of determining the pitch and original speed of early recordings.  My part
of the panel was discussing spoken word recordings.  But I ended by discussing
the Pitch Shifter   I did a live demonstration with speech, but discussed its
potential use in disguising counterfeit recordings.  It still amazes me that so
few there in 1986 had know about devices like the Eventide Harmonizer, and that
even fewer had known of earlier tape based devices.  Some of you might remember
that at last year's Seattle ARSC my daughter Leah demonstrated the same live
pitch shifter I had used in 1986 and that I showed a videotape of the tape
based mechanical pitch shifter from the 1960s that I own.

I had already heard discussions of the issueing of fake recordings supposedly
of legendary conductors like Furtwangler, and how the true identity of some of
them were discovered by syncing them up on variable speed turntables.  In
disclosing the existance of pitch shifters, I warned the attendees that it
could be used to speed up or slow down  recordings and restore the pitch to the
normal key.  Therefore, if you tried to sync two suspect  recordings by pitch,
the tempos wouldn't match, and if you tried to sync them by tempo the pitch
wouldn't match.  I said back then that if you could sync the recordings so that
the tempo of the notes matched exactly, don't worry that the pitches don't
match.  The pirate disguised the recording with a pitch shifter.  But I then
went one step further.  I reminded the group that because these devices are
continuously variable, the pirate might change the speed setting at several
points in the recording, so don't worry if the speed-to-pitch ratio changes
several times during the recording.

These are the techniques used to disguise dozens, if not hundreds, of
recordings as those of Joyce Hatto.  And I predicted it publicly in 1986.  Now
that pitch shifting is avaliable in almost every digital editing program, the
Hatto recordings might be just the tip of the iceburg.

On a lighter note, I wish we could convince David Hamilton and Tom Owen to
release the recordings of The Caruso Brothers.  This is even better than the
Nelson Eddy recordings for Willie, the Operatic Whale.

Mike Biel  mbiel@xxxxxxx